Mentor Verification Is First to Deliver Portable Stimulus Technology Across the Full Enterprise Verification Platform

Mentor, a Siemens business, announced it has expanded its portable test and stimulus technology across its full Enterprise Verification Platform™ to enable users to verify more with the same resources. Now RTL (register transfer level) design and verification engineers can use the same advanced test techniques across block, subsystem, and SoC (systems on a chip) level testing, and execute these tests on simulation, emulation, and post-silicon testing platforms. Mentor has taken a leading role in driving the Accellera Portable Stimulus Working Group that has developed the Portable Test and Stimulus standard language for describing portable stimulus tests.

Mentor’s portable test and stimulus technology enables users to verify more with the same resources, reuse test intent across all the verification engines in the Enterprise Verification Platform, and bring automated test creation to areas where previously only hand-created tests were available. The Portable Test and Stimulus technology provides a single description of scenario(s) to be exercised that can be reused by all stakeholders across the various stages of the verification cycle: from architects to RTL verification engineers to post-silicon validation engineers and software teams on a variety of platforms from simulation and virtual platforms to FPGA prototypes, emulation, and even post-silicon.

“Complex designs and aggressive schedules necessitate an increase in verification productivity. Mentor's portable stimulus solution enabled us to boost test-creation productivity by an order of magnitude, and reduce the time required to achieve functional coverage goals," said Sundararajan Haran, Senior Engineering Manager, Microsemi. "As Microsemi focuses on delivering highly differentiated solutions to the aerospace and defense, communications, data center, and industrial markets, the ability to create tests more productively and achieve coverage goals more quickly is vital. The Questa® inFact™ tool does just that, enabling us to find bugs earlier in the verification cycle and increasing our confidence in verification results.”

Mentor has leading expertise in the portable stimulus space, and is committed to educating the industry on this exciting new technology. Mentor also has a leading role in the Accellera Portable Stimulus Working Group, and contributed the language used by Mentor’s Questa inFact testbench automation tool to the standardization process. In addition, Mentor’s Verification Academy offers a course with information on benefits and applications of the emerging standard.

“Users across the full span of Mentor’s Enterprise Verification Platform can now take advantage of cutting-edge automated test techniques to achieve more verification with the same resources,” said Matthew Ballance, Verification Product Manager, Portable Stimulus technology at Mentor. “We have been happy to contribute our expertise and technology in the portable stimulus space to further the work that Accellera’s Portable Stimulus Working Group is doing to develop a standard input language for capturing portable stimulus test intent.”

About the Verification Academy The Mentor Graphics Verification Academy is the most comprehensive resource for verification engineers, and provides access to information and online training on advanced functional verification technologies. The Verification Academy is the first of its kind—unlike anything in the industry. Its goals are to provide the skills necessary to mature an organization’s advanced functional verification process capabilities. To this end, the Verification Academy provides a methodological bridge between high-level value propositions related to advanced verification technology and the low-level details related to specific tool and verification language details. Visit Verification Academy to access the many training courses, cookbooks, forums, Patterns Library, and events and resources.